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At the Movies

By Lawrence Van Gelder

Published: April 26, 1991

About That Ox

"I have had this story in my head all my life," Sven Nykvist said.

Mr. Nykvist, the Swedish cinematographer who has left his imprint on films by such eminent directors as Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen, was talking about a story he calls "The Ox," a tale that has prompted him to make one of his infrequent ventures into directing.

"It was told by my uncle and grandfather who lived on a farm in the south of Sweden," said the 68-year-old Mr. Nykvist, who said he heard the story when he was 10. The events took place in 1868, a time when perhaps a million of the nation's four million people were immigrating to America. "There was drought there," Mr. Nykvist said of Sweden. "Most people had difficulty surviving."

Among them were a couple of his grandfather's farmhands.

"My grandfather couldn't pay their salaries any longer," Mr. Nykvist said. "A farmhand and his wife had to move up to a little cottage in the forest and try to survive on what nature could give."

Eventually, though, their desperation prompted an act with severe consequences for another hard-pressed family.

A few years ago, Mr. Nykvist said, when he was in New York working on Mr. Allen's "Crime and Misdemeanors," he used his weekends to write a synopsis of the "The Ox," which eventually drew sufficient financing from a variety of sources to enable him to begin filming last autumn.

In his cast are Eva Froling and Stellan Skarsgard, who play the farmhands, and some of Mr. Nykvist's old friends from the Bergman films, Liv Ullmann, Max von Sydow and Erland Josephson, with whom Mr. Nykvist formed a production company several years ago.

Mr. Nykvist was in New York City to receive the Ingmar Bergman Award of the American-Scandinavian Foundation, bestowed in recognition of "the enduring cultural legacy that the five Nordic countries have given the United States."

He said he hoped to begin work as a cinematographer on Richard Attenborough's long-planned and often delayed biography of Charlie Chaplin this year.

But first, Mr. Nykvist is heading back to Sweden to finish "The Ox. From a Wedding

When Alan Alda's comedy "Betsy's Wedding" came out in the summer, the critics flipped -- not over the movie, but over one of the actors in a subplot of the story about a family wedding.

The actor is Anthony LaPaglia, and when it comes to "Betsy's Wedding," Mr. LaPaglia said, "It basically changed a lot of things."

For one, it started Mr. LaPaglia on a career in movies in an unexpected way. For another, the critical accolades led to a co-starring role opposite Michael Keaton in the Touchstone film "One Good Cop," opening next month, and to a leading role in "29th Street," a comedy-drama with Danny Aiello, for release late this year by 20th Century Fox.

Right now, Mr. LaPaglia is at work for Home Box Office, with Louis Gossett Jr. and Peter Coyote, playing a religious psychotic serial killer in "Keeper of the City."

Ahead is a role in "The Pretender," a movie based on a script by George Gallo, who wrote "Midnight Run" and who wrote and directed "29th Street." "The Pretender" is about a man who comes out of prison planning to go straight and falls in love with a society woman. "He tells one lie, which leads to another and another," Mr. LaPaglia said. "It's a very sweet, funny script."

When it comes to scripts, it was Mr. Alda's screenplay for "Betsy's Wedding" that sent Mr. LaPaglia into movies.

He had just finished appearing in a play, he recalled, when a casting director asked him to sit around with a group of actors and read the script of "Betsy's Wedding" so Mr. Alda could ponder revisions. And, Mr. LaPaglia said, after the second reading, Mr. Alda and Martin Bregman, a producer of the film, offered him the part of Stevie Dee.

At the time, Mr. LaPaglia said, he was having a hard time starting a film career.

"It's a Catch-22 thing," he said. "You can't get a film unless you've done one. Fortunately, Alan Alda and Marty Bregman took a chance and it worked out. It made people pretty receptive to me working in film."